Hi There! This is my first post on Journaly,
Spanish is my mother tongue but I decided to read this book in English, I haven't been practicing much lately. I'm mainly focused on German at the moment.
I've already read the first chapters of the book, I really liked how the author portrays the post-war scenario as well as the main characters , you can immerse yourself in the story thanks to the narrative style and all the details mentioned.
What methods or strategies are you guys using to read this book? personally I prefer to use a kind of combination of extensive reading and intensive reading, and this approach is working out with this novel so far.
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You write in English very well; just pay more attention to capitalization. :-) I'm using an extensive reading approach for this book, which is generally the approach I prefer. Although if I find a particular word really beautiful or intriguing then I will look it up. I've also started keeping a list of my favorite passages. I really love the author's style.
Thanks for the corrections! i'm also writting a list with all my favourites passages, that is a good way to learn new vocab too
Hi Maximiliano, I'm reading the book in Italian and listening to the audiobook in Italian as well. For getting the most out of it and learning a lot of words, I'm reading it in parallel in Romanian, which is a language that I know quite well, but which is not my mother tongue. Im writing my notes on Journaly so feel free to have a look. In another post I've seen that you can get the PDF from a website called PDFDrive, so I got it in several languages I know. It's the first time I'm doing this, but I'm now reading the first chapter in 5 languages. It's so fascinating to see the complex language of Zafón and how it's sometimes hard to translate accurately...
Hi Erich! That is an excellent method! I'll listen to the audiobook too. I also downloaded the German and Spanish version from PDFDrive, that website is amazing you can find all kinds of resources and books there. I want to read the spanish version to see if there are details or subtle things that are not depicted in the translations, it's certainly quite hard to translate accurately this kind of narrative.
@eco-erich Thanks so much for the PDF Drive recommendation! It looks like an incredible resource, although I do wonder about copyright issues. @MaxGerman I'm a professional translator myself, and I've just recently started thinking about getting into literary translation. There have been many times when I paused while reading La Sombra del Viento and thought, "how the h&*! would I translate that passage?!". Literary translation is a real art.
Hi, Maximilian and Wendy! It would be fun to compare what we have chosen as favourite passages. I also have a couple of lists going. Some phrases like for their humour, some for their beautiful images and strikingly original comparisons... I'm sure there will be a spin-off entry about these eventually!
@Diane_A Here's one of my favorites, from chapter 4 of part 1: "Mi madre se apagó en apenas unos meses. Los médicos dijeron que era el corazón, y yo creo que por una vez acertaron." Also, I JUST published this post about untranslatable passages from the book: https://journaly.com/post/5427. I'm thinking this might be the first in a series!